Franziska: Hi, and welcome back to Basic Bananas TV. Now I’d like to share something with you that is very important, not only in business but even in personal life, and that is values. So, what are values? I usually say that your values are really your guiding principles. They are your compass. They are the things that you don’t compromise on. Oftentimes, you have separate values in your life. You have your personal values, and they might be things like you really value health or family or relationships. What’s important to you in your personal life. But then also we have business values, and really that’s what I’m talking about here.

Your business values are the things in your business that you would never compromise on. They are the things that matter. They are part of your branding essence. They’re really part of your business essence, even. How do you find them? How do you find your values? You basically ask yourself what’s important to us in this business? Also, you can ask yourself what are some things that we would never compromise on? That could be words like fun. For us as Basic Bananas we definitely have fun as one of our core values. We also have integrity. Integrity is very important. We also have simplicity, making the complex simple. Then what you do is get a few of those words first and make sure that you really believe in that, and make sure that your business can provide, can deliver on those values. You don’t pick a value, say for example, fun, and then there’s nothing fun about your business. If you pick that value of fun you have to make sure that your business is fun, and when somebody interacts with your business, it’s fun, your team is having fun. Make sure you can be congruent.

Now, the next thing you can do, so pick a word first. The next thing you can then do is you can make it a sentence. You can make it a little bit of an activity. For example, if I use fun, I might say the sentence could be that we never compromise on fun, or we always make sure that there is a bit of fun involved in whatever we are doing. And, you know, a business that has really good values, that is, one of those businesses that has done a really good job with values and also purpose statements, which I’m going to talk about in a separate video, is Zappos.

Of course, actually some of their values here printed just to show you how they’re doing it. They have, I think they have about ten or so values, and one of them says, “Be adventurous, creative and open-minded” or “Pursue growth and learning” or “Build a positive team and family spirit”, and I know that this is one of those companies that really, really, really lives by that. They really live by those values and they … When you walk into their offices you can see that they don’t compromise on this, and it’s what makes this business so successful. It’s really what makes the business attractive to the customers.

So as a little call to action for you, maybe if you haven’t already, think about what are our values in this business? Make it maybe a little bit of a sentence, and make sure that if you have them, and once you have them, share them. You can put them on your About page, you can share them with your team. Actually, you should share them with your team, because your team needs to be on board with this. Our Basic Bananas Canada founder, Erik, is going to talk about in an upcoming video about how to use these values to grow your team. How do you use your values to grow your team, to hire your team members.

That’s it for today. If you found this valuable and you know someone who would benefit from this tip on values, feel free to share the video with them. Thanks so much for watching.